Countless times she had caught him watching her when she had her nose in her notebooks. And she’d chewed many a pen cap that year while watching him offer explanations for Emma Bovary’s feelings.
She was sure this love was reciprocal. And, weirdly, they both had the same surname. This had troubled her, although their name, Leroy, was a common one.
A few days before sitting the French exam for the baccalauréat, Olivia, one of a small group of pupils revising with François, had dared to say to him:
“Monsieur Leroy, if we married each other, nothing would change. We’d have no admin to go through, neither for our ID papers nor for the bills.”
The whole group burst out laughing, and François blushed.
Olivia passed her French bac, getting 19 for the oral, and 19 for the written part. She sent a note to François, “Monsieur, I didn’t get 20 because you haven’t yet found a solution to our problem.”
He had waited until after the bac to ask to see her for a one-on-one meeting. After a long silence, which she took as a symptom of love, he had said to her:
“Olivia, a brother and a sister don’t marry each other.”
Initially, she had laughed. She had laughed because he’d said her first name, when before he’d always called her mademoiselle. And then she had stopped laughing while he stared at her, intensely. She had remained speechless when François had informed her that they both had the same father. François had been born of a previous union, near Nice, twenty years before Olivia. Their father and François’s mother had lived together for two years, and then separated, painfully. The years had passed by.
François had done some research much later and learnt that his father had remarried and was the father of a little girl called Olivia.
The father had concealed François’s existence from his second family. They had seen each other again. François got himself transferred to Mâcon to be closer to him.
He had been shocked to discover that his sister was a pupil in his class. When her name was called, on the first day of term, he’d thought it an unfortunate coincidence when she had stopped whispering in her neighbor’s ear to raise her hand at her name and whisper, “Present,” while looking him straight in the eye. He had recognized her because they looked alike. He had noticed her because he knew; she hadn’t noticed him because she knew nothing.
At first, Olivia hadn’t wanted to believe it. To believe that her father could have concealed François’s existence. She had thought that he was inventing this story to put an end to the seduction games of a capricious child. And then, when she understood that the story was true, she had said, with feigned light-heartedness, to François:
“We don’t come from the same stomach, it doesn’t count. I really love you.”
Controlling his anger, he had replied to her:
“No, forget it, forget that right now.”
Then there had been the final year. Their paths would cross in the school corridors. Every time she caught sight of him, she wanted to throw herself into his arms. But not like a sister into the arms of her brother.
He avoided her, bowed his head. Annoyed, she would do a detour to confront him and virtually shout at him:
“Hello, Monsieur Leroy!”
And he would reply, shyly:
“Hello, Mademoiselle Leroy.”
She hadn’t dared to ask her father anything. She hadn’t needed to. She had seen how he had looked at François on the day the diplomas were handed out at the end of the year.
Olivia had caught a smile between François and their father. She’d felt like grabbing one to kill the other. Her tears and her anger welled up. She could see no way out, other than to forget.
After the diploma ceremony, there had been a celebration. Pupils and teachers took turns performing onstage. After some covers of songs by the groups Trust and Téléphone, François had sung “Blue Room” a cappella, with the same intensity as Chet Baker: We’ll have a blue room, a new room for two room, where ev’ry day’s a holiday because you’re married to me . . .
He had sung it for her, gazing into her eyes. She had understood that she would never love any man but him. And that this impossible love was reciprocal.
And then off she had gone. Had been around the world more than once, and had qualified to become a teacher of literature herself. She had married elsewhere, to someone else. She had changed her name.
Seven years later, at the age of twenty-five, she returned to live with François. She knocked on his door one morning, and said to him, “Now we can live together, I don’t have the same name as you. We won’t get married, we won’t have a child, but at least we will live together.” François replied, “O.K.”
They had continued to use the formal “vous” with each other, always. As though to keep a distance between them. To remain at the beginning, like a first date. Life had given them twenty years together. The same number as the years that separated them.
While drinking some port, Olivia said to me, “Our family rejected us, but we didn’t suffer from it that much, our family was us. When François died, as if to punish us, his mother had him cremated here, in Brancion-en-Chalon, the town she was born in. To make her son disappear completely, she had his ashes scattered in the garden of remembrance. But he will never disappear, I will carry him forever within me. He was my soul brother.”
27.
A weak dawn spills across the fields
the melancholy of setting suns.
As soon as Léonine was born, I ordered a textbook to relearn to read: The Little Ones’ Day Out—Boscher Method, by M. Boscher, V. Boscher, J. Chapron (primary-school teachers),
